Opinion | How Yogi Adityanath turned Uttar Pradesh's expressways from single road into state network

Dr Patanjali Mishra

A state the size of Uttar Pradesh cannot be governed from one city and visited from the others. Distance has long been its hidden tax: on the price of a sack of grain, on the hour a patient spends between districts, on whether a factory in Jhansi or Ghazipur is a site or a rumour. Since 2017 the Yogi Adityanath government has treated that distance as an engineering problem. The result, on figures compiled from UPEIDA, MoRTH and Cabinet papers as of 30 August 2026, is no longer a single road. It is a grid.

Nine named corridors with a published official cost are already open. Their combined project outlay is ₹124,777.94 crore, treated as utilised because the assets are commissioned. Purvanchal, 340.8 kilometers, was tendered afresh in 2018, foundation-stoned that July and opened on 16 November 2021 at ₹22,494.66 crore including land. Bundelkhand, 296 kilometers, opened on 16 July 2022 at ₹14,850 crore. The Gorakhpur Link, 91.4 kilometers, opened on 20 June 2025 at ₹7,283.28 crore. The Ganga Expressway, about 594 kilometers from Meerut to Prayagraj, was taken to Cabinet at ₹36,230 crore and opened on 29 April 2026. The Lucknow–Kanpur expressway, reported after opening at ₹4,200 crore, opened on 13 July 2026. Around them sit the Eastern Peripheral Expressway, inaugurated in May 2018 at a MoRTH construction cost of ₹4,417.89 crore, and the Delhi–Meerut Expressway, fully open from 1 April 2021 at ₹7,855.87 crore. These are not ribbons between the same two cities. Purvanchal ties the east to Lucknow. Bundelkhand ties the dry south-west to the same capital. Ganga runs the spine toward Prayagraj. Gorakhpur is no longer a terminus.

Eight further UPEIDA corridors have a published cabinet cost and are not yet open: Chitrakoot, the Lucknow link; Farrukhabad, the Jewar–Ganga link; Jhansi, the Meerut–Haridwar extension; Vindhya from Prayagraj to Sonbhadra; and the Mirzapur–Ghazipur spur. Together they are professed at Rs 75,873.06 crore. Printed 2026-27 releases that can be tied to this new grid – land and token construction – come to Rs 15,390 crore. Add the open stock and the approved stock and the usable published total is Rs 2,00,651 crore, of which Rs 1,40,167.94 crore is known as disbursed or utilised. State highways sit on a different ledger: the Public Works Department spent about Rs 28,087 crore in 2025-26 against an allocation of Rs 32,676 crore. That is ordinary road stock. It is what makes an expressway usable on the last mile.

The economic claim follows the map, not a brochure. A mill, a mandi or a ward is worth more when the truck does not lose a day. Bundelkhand's expressway is the missing argument for industry on a plateau that politics once described only as scarce. Purvanchal shortens the east’s path to the state capital and, through it, to the west. The Jewar link and the Ganga alignment are aimed at an airport and a riverine corridor, not at a ceremonial avenue. Daily use is plainer still. An inter-district transfer, a wedding party, a load of cane: each is a toll receipt and a saved hour. Neighbouring states are already in the drawing. The Eastern Peripheral and Delhi–Meerut roads bind the National Capital Region; the Haridwar extension and the Agra-side national corridors are meant to carry the same standard past the state line.

What the earlier government left on the file

The contrast with the Samajwadi years is not that nothing was built. The Agra–Lucknow Expressway, 302.22 kilometres, was constructed between 2014 and 2016 and opened in November 2016 at an official cost later stated at Rs14,446 crore. The Yamuna Expressway, opened on 9 August 2012, belongs to a concession signed in 2003. What those years did not leave was a clean ledger or a network. On the Yamuna project, the allegation is that the then YEIDA chief executive, P.C. Gupta, and others bought 57.15 hectares cheaply through nineteen companies and sold it back to the authority at a higher price, a loss put at Rs 126 crore. The Adityanath government had an FIR registered in June 2018; the CBI took the case in December 2019 against Gupta and twenty others. On Agra–Lucknow, the charge is that agricultural land was shown as residential so that compensation would rise and that buyers close to power acquired land cheaply before acquisition. In Firozabad, ninety people were reported to have bought farmers’ land and drawn the higher reward. In April 2017 district magistrates in ten districts were ordered to inquire. An FIR named five consolidation officers and twenty-two landowners. A CAG note recorded an excess payment, including a sum of Rs 3.65 crore. Critics also alleged a per-kilometre cost above the national average. These are charges of land and compensation, not of missing concrete. No major politician has yet been convicted. The indifference, if that is the word, was to the honesty of the acquisition and to anything beyond a single showcase corridor.

The present government has treated the opening day as the start of liability, not the end of it. The Lucknow-Kanpur expressway had its toll briefly suspended in August 2026 so that defects could be repaired, which is the opposite of cutting a ribbon and leaving the motorist to the patch. The 2017 inquiries, and the handing of the Yamuna land case to the CBI were a judgement on the previous file rather than a fresh coat on it. Projects still in Cabinet - Vindhya at Rs 26,315 crore and the Haridwar extension at Rs 10,761 crore - will be judged the same way: by whether land is paid cleanly, whether the contractor is held to the defect, and whether the road is still fit for use after the photographers have left. A grid of that standard is how a state stops being a collection of districts and starts behaving like one economy.

(The author is a professor at Allahabad University and writes on social and political issues. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Zee News.)